This piece by Dick Polman in the Philadelphia Inquirer is worth a look. Of course the fact that the president exists in a self-segregated bubble surrounded by yes-people and all the new he's likely to like isn't anything remotely new. That's been exceedingly well documented - and the dangerous, depressing comparisons to Wilson, Nixon and LBJ have long been made. But this article notes something else that I think is important - and why this often disasterous decision-making flaw is something we need to be concerned about, now more than ever. Bush is now in the sixth year of his presidency, and a lot of the people who've been around since the start 1) don't have fresh eyes to really see things clearly and 2) are exhausted. Working at the White House is about as grueling a regimen as can be imagined (well, for the staff). It's a problem that every second-term president faces - keep around the people you think are the best, but who might really be burned out at this point, or start promoting the second and third best people. It's an enduring problem, a structural problem in our system of government. But its flaws and dangers can be greatly magnified when the president walls himself off from everyone else in the country, even his fellow partisans on Capitol Hill.
Posted by armand at February 27, 2006 01:34 PM | TrackBack | Posted to Politics